


autumn's rare gift

by bee_bro



Series: tma h/c week, babes [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Agnes-Centric, Author Takes Liberties with Canon, Binding Ritual (TMA), Canon-Typical Angst and Mild Existentialism, Cuddling, Dancing, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, TMAHCweek, The Magnus Archives Hurt/Comfort Week, the timeline is probably off cause i didnt do research for this, they deserve to hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:06:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26110855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bee_bro/pseuds/bee_bro
Summary: Annually, the two meet, renewing the binding ritual where it had all started. The procedure simple: a waltz.
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson
Series: tma h/c week, babes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1895815
Comments: 10
Kudos: 46





	autumn's rare gift

**Author's Note:**

> fashionably late for the hurt comfort week, prompt: shaky hands

It’s autumn again but Agnes doesn’t feel the year’s passage, just knows that - once more - the forest is alight with red and that the rains keep fires themselves at bay. Yet the ritual’s grounds remain scorched. She waits, studying the nailed and hanged bottles as they glint and wink at her with the sunrise’s sharp light. She wonders if Gertrude will look older once more. The pictures lining the circle of trees are from years ago, capturing the woman in time and sealing a verdict for the Desolation’s church.

The sun dips over the distant hills and Gertrude arrives silently, boots tall and endlessly quiet against the soaked, dead leaves. There is no trepidation in her step, and yet every year Agnes worries the circle will reject her and burn Gertrude upon entry. It’s never the case.

“With the face you make,” Gertrude approaches her at a leisurely pace, “I’d start thinking you _want_ me to combust.”

She is older. Only by a year, only by _a year,_ but the lines in her face are deeper, her hair grayer. She’d stopped getting taller years ago and Agnes swears she’d somehow gotten _shorter._ Not by much, but when you only see someone annually, these things jump at you, things like scars and worry lines and every etching of time into someone’s stature. Gertrude ages gracefully but she _ages_.

“I’d never.” Agnes answers and stands at a safe distance, doesn’t move closer once Gertrude stops. Five meters between them. Agnes feels each meter the same way she does when it’s thousands more dividing them. She wonders if Gertrude does as well. Won’t ask.

Gertrude lifts a hand, “Shall we?”

Agnes only nods. Their dance begins.

It is a slow waltz, so familiar neither of them must think as they tap patterns into the burnt-out ritual grounds, renewing the vow of binds set here years ago. First, it was only Gertrude, but now they dance both, keeping the same five meter’s distance even as they pretend to spin together.

There is no music, and yet the silence is soon filled with a monotonous buzz, Agnes’ palms beginning to burn as she trains her eyes on her distant dance partner. The buzz only increases as the ritual re-binds them – it’s the sound of water boiling where it had saturated the fallen leaves outside. Steam rises from the ground into the cold air and obscures the forest floor, they keep dancing.

This year Gertrude has a limp. Agnes attempts slowing the dance’s pace but her partner won’t let it, dancing on and on at the regular beat of a song that’s not there. Agnes wonders what will happen the day one of them can no longer do this. Or doesn’t show up. About three more minutes, a whole lot more spins. The boiling ground is now a scream of water, bubbling and billowing mist into the air. Gertrude doesn’t break eye contact even as her glasses fog, palms turning red where she’s got them up in the air as if holding an invisible Agnes.

They spin in the forest’s cursed circle, the bottles beginning to shake where they remain pinned to their trees. And that’s when Gertrude trips.

More accurately, her ankle gives up and goes sideways and Agnes, for all her ingrained fear of touching another, doesn’t spare it a thought and dives to cross the split between them, to catch Gertrude. She gets her, stops her from crumpling, and feels the strong latch of Gertrude’s hands onto her shoulders, steady, warm.

Hands that don’t pull away.

There is no wince, no flinch from Gertrude where Agnes holds her sides or where she holds Agnes’ shoulders. The contact doesn’t burn. Doesn’t melt the skin off her bones. It’s just… normal.

“Pardon?” Gertrude speaks first, just as bewildered it seems, and snaps Agnes out of a spiraling rabbit hole- right, her ankle.

“Are you okay?” She doesn’t let go of Gertrude, the forest around them boils.

“…Surprisingly, yes.” Gertrude says it with her eyes trained on where their hands meet and don’t leave fire. They’ve made the mistake of brushing elbows once and Gertrude still has a scar. “Has this ever happened before? With others?”

“Only Desolate avatars.”

Neither voice the vast implications of that, and instead Gertrude chuckles, sandpaper on gravel.

“Last I checked, the Eye was still grappling to keep me,” she doesn’t let go at all, her hands are strong, “Then I suppose, it must be free-range within the ritual.”

“Safer if we let go, then.” Agnes shifts on her feet, “Lest it passes and I melt you.”

“Safer indeed.”

Neither move.

A tree shatters in the distance, having boiled on the inside for too long. The crack of its fall makes Agnes jump and immediately chastise herself, as Gertrude hadn’t reacted at all.

“I suppose we should get on with it.” Gertrude puts weight back on her traitor ankle, “Before the wildlife here takes any more hits.

Agnes only nods but as they re-spark their dance, there is no more gap between them.

This is Agnes’ first proper waltz. And above all hope, something tells her: the last. She will make it count.

“Do you think I’ll hurt you again once the ritual seals?” She can speak quietly, they’re close.

“One way to find out,” and even with her bad leg and fogged glasses, Gertrude is a strong dancer, competent, her palms warm and dry, just like Agnes had imagined her hands might feel. They twirl and twirl and the forest plays with rising warmth, everywhere now painfully hot except for the circle itself, slowly being overgrown with rising mist from the ground. Vapored water dances with them and swirls in patterns where they pass through it, almost like smoke. It’s the same every year but everything comes into sharper focus with Gertrude this close, everything feels so insanely wilder, more powerful. They hit the last spin and their hands are locked and Agnes is dreading the moment Gertrude yanks her palm back in pain.

That moment never comes.

The dance is over and their fingers stay interlocked.

The boiling outside seizes.

“Huh.” Gertrude doesn’t move, surveying their hands, “I suppose the greater dreadful universe has permitted us one marble of peace.”

Peace. She’s right. Agnes watches her grey eyes and where her glasses meet her ears, where the skin is red. The metal frames must have grown hot and burned.

She can’t help but ask, “Why do you keep your glasses on?”

Gertrude looks up in rare surprise. It takes a lot to make the woman look caught off guard and Agnes can count on one hand how often that’s happened. But soon her face melts into an expression between pained and regretful. Like what she might say is of great suffering. Instead, and said very quietly, it’s this: “I’d choose to see the person I waltz with above getting mild burns any day, Agnes.”

“You waltz with a lot of others?”

“Never.”

“Me too.”

Agnes will never know why this is what makes Gertrude cry.

She’d never imagined her crying, never fathomed it to be possible, but now seeing it, it’s oddly fitting. She doesn’t make a sound but her eyes well up, dodging to the side as she bites down on her lower lip to quell it. Her grip on Agnes’ hand doesn’t change, her stance locked and tense. And standing in this forsaken stretch of wild woods, only rarely passed by human or human-like presence, standing in a violently scorched-out circle of sacrifice and ritualistic promise. Holding someone’s hand for the first time and feeling the skin under her palm remain whole and _real,_ not the candle-like quality of her brethren. Holding the hand of someone Agnes suspects to be equally as hunted by their own thoughts if not by the world…

In the company of a woman so stubbornly lonely she sometimes smells of a misty ocean, Agnes understands why one might cry.

She hugs Gertrude, envelops her and rests her chin on the woman’s head, wraps her and holds her and thanks whatever luck or chance or pure random chaos had brought them to this loophole of human touch.

They stand in the woods and rock back and forth, holding on for dear life, holding on like they’re making up for years of pushing people away and burying coworkers and allies, years of choosing solitude to mitigate the body count, years of dancing five feet apart. And deep-down Agnes suspects this will never occur again. Something will happen between this autumn and the next. Simply put, this is not a world where happiness strikes twice.

She holds Gertrude closer.

There is a fear that belongs to no entity, only to them in that moment, that if they let go of each other, the spell will break. Their allegiances will once more become the undoing of their unlikely and quiet friendship.

And so they stay close. They sit thigh-to-thigh, where the ground is dry with burnt-out leaves, they hold hands and Agnes leans her head on Gertrude’s shoulder. She traces rough patches of skin over Gertrude’s knuckles with her thumb where they had been split against whatever she punched. Gertrude watches the sky, her face once more clean of traces she might’ve been upset. They don’t talk.

They can talk anytime else. They can call and sit at a safe distance in cafes all they want. This is not a talking time, the moment already so deeply overwhelmed with an unfathomable occasion to simply touch. To coexist while feeling the other close. To cry into someone’s chest. Agnes will forever remember and cherish the feeling of someone else’s fingers in her hair, brushing the locks with absent, slow, movements. They spend hours in that clearing, never breaking apart lest its permanent.

It would be cold if not for the persistent presence of Agnes’ entity among the lands. The ground itself seems to radiate heat, even so close to winter. Midday, Gertrude reaches for her cigarettes, their arms locked and legs pressed together. The pack is more than half done and the practiced slide of that cigarette case from Gertrude’s bag and back in is smooth and telling. The lighting of said cig is not as graceful.

She puts a lighter up to its tip and Agnes swears there’s a pattern etched on it, one she can’t see as Gertrude’s hand shakes. The flame dances back and forth, missing the cig but Gertrude stays calm like this is normal. She patiently attempts to guide the flame to it but the jitter won’t let up, and she only now notices Agnes watching.

The lighter is lowered in bizarre self-awareness. Agnes wonders when the shaking had set in. This year? Five years ago? A decade? Along with the too-young gray hair? Along with the sharp exhaustion in her eyes? Who’s death was it? Which prevented apocalypse? What disappearance? What case? What had sown the seeds of her hands, that rest calmly when unaware but begin to tremor when given a task- what had sown the seeds of such rapid erosion?

Agnes lifts a finger to the tip of the cig and it sizzles to life.

She says nothing about the shaky fingers that come up to hold the cig as Gertrude sighs out smoke, only lowers her hand back to hold Gertrude’s free one.

And Gertrude utters the first words in hours, a simple ‘ _thank you.’_

Agnes kisses her knuckles and when the smoke is done and Gertrude’s hands are free, she takes Agnes’ face in her warm palms and kisses her forehead where a third eye might lie. They hug more and both will never talk about this again, never admit it happened, but Agnes knows it’s already changing her. She will remember this forever.

She doesn’t know who leans in first, their kiss is chaste, almost friendly, and both know they cannot even risk dipping into romanticism. It’s a dead-end road, Agnes supposes. And wishes she’s right. Because if they’re wrong about absolving from love, will it not hurt more than it already does?

To, after hours of holding one another, soft, slow kisses, hiding your face in one’s neck, playing with hair and smoothing the stress-etched lines on another’s face- to accidentally break apart?

Like the kiss, Agnes isn’t sure what happens.

One moment they’re shifting to stand, and Gertrude’s ankle must land wrong again, or Agnes’ hair gets in the way of seeing where she’s going- or _something._ But they lose hold. And when Gertrude reaches back toward her, it proves them right.

Her fingertips make the briefest of contact and sizzle. She jerks away on instinct, so does Agnes. And once more, their distance resumes. Safer that way. Safer, now that things are back to their norm. Their horrible, dreadful norm.

What is there to say? See you next year? I’m sorry?

I love you?

None are good options. So they just nod, and they leave, and they hope that next autumn will grant them another chance at solace. 

**Author's Note:**

> to everyone who knows i have like 4 WIPs that need doing, i am hoping the one-shot h/c week will gear me back up to finishing those, thanks for understanding <3


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